“color blind” was published to accompany Bayeté Ross Smith’s solo show “Our Kind Of People” at beta pictoris gallery in Birmingham, AL September 10 – October 16, 2010.

Bayeté Ross Smith is an artist, photographer, and arts educator. Previously based in San Francisco, the artist currently resides in New York City.

Ross Smith’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally by the San Francisco Arts Commission, Oakland Museum of California, Rush Arts Gallery, Leica Gallery, MoMA P.S.1, Goethe Institute (Ghana), and Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Poland). His collaborative film with the Cause Collective screened at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.

Ross Smith began his career as a photojournalist for Knight Ridder Newspaper Corporation in the 1990’s. His photographs have been published in numerous books and magazines, including Dis:Integration: The Splintering of Black America (2010), Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009), Black: A Celebration of A Culture (2005), The Spirit Of Family (2002); SPE Exposure: The Society of Photographic Education Journal, Black Enterprise, Working Mother Magazine, and the various publications of Village Voice Media.

As an educator, Ross Smith has taught college students, and mentored youth through community based art projects. He has worked with the International Center of Photography, California College of the Arts, and numerous K-12 and college level courses throughout the California Bay Area, and New York City.

Ross Smith’s accolades include fellowships and residencies with the Laundromat Project, Brooklyn, New York, the Kala Institute, Berkeley, California, Can Serrat Art Center, Barcelona, Spain, and McColl Center for Visual Art, Charlotte, North Carolina.

I’m not on promo my game, but tomorrow in Ithaca, New York, at 5:00 p.m. I am presenting a paper on black photographers and publishing as part of the Visual Culture Colloquium at Cornell University. Despite the fact that it took me so long to publicize this I’m really looking forward to it!

November 9, 2009 – 5:00PM

Goldwyn Smith Gallery

Open to Public, Alumni, Students, Faculty, and Staff

Though not strictly photography, this is the catalog of an exhibition that originated at the Hood Museum in New Hampshire earlier this year; I contributed an essay to the catalogue and images to the show (but the reproduction of my work in the catalogue is terrible–I wish someone has told me and asked me to replace the file–ugh!). I was so thrilled to see one of Maud Sulter’s images on the cover, only to be shocked soon after with news of her premature death. Overall, this is a well-illustrated catalogue with lots of terrific work. From the publisher’s site:

Explorations of contemporary art have focused on issues of identity and race for some time. Few, however, have sought to investigate these themes by juxtaposing historical and contemporary frameworks. Black Womanhood examines an especially charged icon – the black female body – and contemporary artists’ interventions upon historical images of black women as exotic Others, erotic fantasies, and supermaternal Mammies.

This book presents icons of the black female body as seen from three separate but intersecting perspectives: the traditional African, the colonial, and the contemporary global. The display and contemplation of such iconic images addresses complex and often competing forces of self-presentation and the representation of others. Peeling back layers of social, cultural, and political realities, Black Womanhood explores how historic icons inform contemporary artistic responses to the black female body through an examination of themes such as beauty, fertility and sexuality, maternity, and women’s roles and power in society.

More than 200 historical and contemporary images accompany written contributions by artists, curators and scholars. This compelling volume makes a valuable contribution to ongoing discussions of race, gender, and sexuality by promoting a deeper understanding of past and present readings of black womanhood, both in Africa and in the West.

Barbara Thompson is curator of African, Oceanic, and Native American collections at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. The other contributors are Ifi Amadiume, Ayo Abietou Coly, Christraud Geary, Enid Schildkrout, Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Carla Williams, and Deborah Willis.